"All this region is very level and full of forests, vines and butternut trees. No Christian has ever visited this land and we had all the misery of the world trying to paddle the river upstream." Samuel de Champlain

Jean Hill has proposed a ban on the sale of bottled water in Concord, which will be reviewed by the state attorney general and could go into effect next January.

Henry David Thoreau was jailed here 164 years ago for refusing to pay taxes while living at Walden Pond. Now the town has Jean Hill to contend with. Mrs. Hill, an octogenarian previously best known for her blueberry jam, proposed banning the sale of bottled water here at a town meeting this spring. Voters approved, with the intent of making Concord the first town in the nation to strip Aquafina, Poland Spring and the like from its stores.

In orchestrating an outright ban, Mrs. Hill, 82, has achieved something that powerful environmental groups have not even tried. The bottled water industry is not pleased; it has threatened to sue if the ban takes effect as planned on Jan. 1. Officials here have hinted that they might not strictly enforce it, but Mrs. Hill, who described herself as obsessed, said that would only deepen her resolve.

“I’m going to work until I drop on this,” she said. “If you believe in something, you have to persist and you have to have a thick skin.” “The bottled water companies are draining our aquifers and selling it back to us,” she said, repeating her pitch from the town meeting in April. “We’re trashing our planet, all because of greed.”

Extraits de l'article publié dans L'Oeil Régional ici: http://monteregieweb.com/main+fr+01_300+Les_citoyens_devant_la_CPTAQ.html?ArticleID=650003~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The only thing stopping a drilling company to start looking for natural gas in this little town downriver from me is a rubber stamp from the para-governmental commission that sees to the conservation of agricultural land in the province of Quebec. Quite ironic, isn't it? While the agricultural lobby keeps decrying the loss of agricultural land to housing development, they haven't refused money from the gas industry up to now.

Never mind that hydraulic fracturing needs large quantities of water that the town barely can provide to its citizens as it is! Never mind that huge amounts of polluted water will need to be stored, trucked and treated! Never mind that the drilling will be done near a much important stream that helps the barely surviving Copper Redhorse! Never mind that the city council, the MRC and most of the people of Saint-Marc-sur-Richelieu don't want fracking be done in and under their land! Never mind that the Richelieu River, already very near the eutrophication point, will have to deal with the barely treated contaminated water of this drilling adventure!

Project Laundry List invites members of the public to a slide-show and presentation about hydroelectric dams in Northern Quebec and its plans to deliver electricity to New England markets as "green power."

Participants and attendees will learn about man-made reservoirs the size of whole US States, plans to dam the North for more power that will get consumed in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and schemes to split the New England region with transmission lines, despite unavoidable, massive transmission losses and the need to cut a new right-of-way through New England's forests.

"Vermonters, their newspapers and public radio station have been following these developments for months," said Lee. "When is New Hampshire going to start paying attention?"

This month Vermont, the only New England state without a renewable portfolio standard (RPS), decided to qualify large hydro as renewable, green power. A Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate is now angling to see all of New England change their standards, according to his platform.

"Thanks to Gov. Douglas and the VT legislature, the flood-gates have been opened," said Lee. "How long will it be before NU/PSNH announces plans to contribute conservation lands so that they can help Hydro-Quebec construct a major transmission line through the heart of our state? What will this mean for small-scale renewables development across the region?"

Project Laundry List Executive Director Alexander Lee has paddled the Rupert River, which was just dammed, five times and wrote extensively about the Northern Quebec hydro projects completed prior to the early 1990s. He has presented to the New Hampshire conservation community and to the Science, Technology, and Energy Committee of the NH House on this topic.

Project Laundry List is making air-drying laundry acceptable and desirable as a simple and effective way to save energy. It is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization which aims to demonstrate that personal choices can make a difference for the Earth and its people."

The long-term effects of hydro-electric dams in Quebec rivers can be felt for a long time. The power dam in my town was torn down in 1965, but I'm still waiting for the river to regain its natural beauty. Witness the picture above with the signs and the fence preventing us from enjoying the swimming hole I knew 50 years ago! If one house in every town could cover its roof with solar panels and sell its surplus to Hydro-Quebec without prohibitive inspection charges, new hydro-electric dams would not have to be built, and old ones could be demolished too!

Life-long Onslow County resident Sydney Whaley was sitting on his front porch on a hot summer day in 1995 watching traffic that had been routed past his A.I. Taylor Road home because of a wreck on U.S. 258 when a river of hog manure flooded the street as high as the cars’ bumpers. Fifteen years later, Whaley, 78, homebound with an oxygen tank at his side, said he can still smell the manure. On June 21, 1995, the side of an 8-acre hog waste lagoon at Oceanview Farms ruptured, spilling nearly 22 million gallons of hog waste into the surrounding area, including tributaries that feed into the New River.

The waste quickly spread into a giant deadly plume, making its way from the Richlands area all the way down river to Jacksonville. Thousands of fish caught in its path were killed. The stench — dead fish mingling with hog waste — was nearly unbearable in the days that followed, residents at the time said. About a mile from the spill, roadside ditches were filled with the frothy reddish-brown effluent, according to archived news reports.

Hog farm operations store raw urine and feces in open lagoons and spray the material onto fields during warmer months. Oceanview Farms did not have enough acres for spraying the amount of hog waste stored in the farm’s lagoon, which caused the waste to be a foot higher than it should have been, according to a state environmental report issued the year after the spill.

New Riverkeeper Tess Sanders said that since regulatory agencies, lawsuits and legislation have failed to change the way farmers eliminate hog waste, we are “as close to another major spill as we have ever been.” Sanders, however, said she does not blame the farmers. “Multi-million dollar corporations control many factory farms,” she said, adding that what was once thousands of family hog farms are now a few hundred industrial swine facilities that raise more pigs a year than North Carolina has people. She said many eastern North Carolina hog farmers are mortgaged up to their eyeballs and in hock to the meat processing plants they are contracted with to sell their animals.

“The bottom line is that corporations have cleverly designed a system of conducting business that makes them immune from the liability of mismanagement of animal waste and the harm it causes public health and the environment,” she said. “The corporations own the food and the hogs; the farmers own the debt and the pig (feces).”

Sanders said a lot of time, energy and money have been invested in new technology to improve the way hog waste is dealt with, but farmers have chosen not to implement any changes. In 1997, the General Assembly enacted a 10-year moratorium on new hog farms. In 2007, the Swine Farm Environmental Performance Standard Act permanently banned the use of lagoons and sprayfields as the primary method of waste treatment for new or expanding farms, and requires such farms to use a superior waste management technology.

There have been no new hog farms in North Carolina since 1997. Only one farm, in Sampson County, has undertaken the changes required to expand, said Keith Larick, the animal feeding operations unit supervisor with the N.C. Division of Water Quality. A 2006 Waterkeepers Alliance lawsuit settlement with Smithfield Foods requires North Carolina hog farmers to adapt new environmentally-friendly technology into their waste systems when it becomes feasible to do so. “It will never be cheaper than dumping it into a big hole in the ground,” Sanders said.

Lane (hog farmer) said he sat on a panel at N.C. State University that reviewed the alternatives, and most of the ideas were no better than lagoons. “The ideas are just too cost prohibitive,” he said. “We can’t afford to do it. We don’t farm hogs in a bubble; we are competing with the rest of the world.” And North Carolina hog farmers are already regulated more than in any other state, said Tommy Stevens, the director of environmental services for the N.C. Pork Council. “North Carolina hog farmers have to submit to two compliance inspections a year,” he said.

Whaley, who often sits on his front porch and stares across the road to the spot where in 1995 hog waste flooded a tobacco field and rose halfway up the tires of a passing Trailways bus, said he doesn’t believe hog farmers have changed. “We fought them putting in the hog house and lost; and after the dam broke, we fought them and lost,” he said. “A little man out here don’t have no voice. Our families built this county, but other people run it now.”

Despite hundred of thousands of dollars in fines and court costs and a class action lawsuit, Oceanview Farms still raises pigs. At close to 10 million hogs, North Carolina is the No. 2 producer of swine in the United States behind Iowa. Hogs produce more fecal matter in eastern North Carolina each day than is produced by all the combined residents of North Carolina, California, Pennsylvania, New York, Texas, New Hampshire, and North Dakota, according to a study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill."

Things are much the same in Quebec. Quebec produces at least 7 million pigs a year. There are more hogs in N.C. than people. The hog facility in Richelieu can house more hogs than there are people in Richelieu. Quebec is a lot like N.C., except we don't have 2 inspections a year. And companies like Oceanview Farms are called integrators here, like F. Ménard and Groupe Robitaille. The open house party invitation for the pig farm in Richelieu was signed by the 2 brothers and Groupe Robitaille...

If some folks here are a little on edge, it's not hard to understand why. This is Garfield County, in the heart of the Piceance Basin, where residents live atop at least 21 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Drilling has a long history here, and so do people's worries: In 2008, outfitter Ned Prather drank a glass of water from his tap and ended up in the hospital, poisoned by chemicals that had seeped into his spring. Eighteen gas wells surrounded his property. A 2007 county study found at least five drinking water wells contaminated with methane. In 2004, West Divide Creek was so contaminated by methane and benzene that neighbors could light it on fire. Locals blame hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the process in which drillers shoot over a million gallons of high-pressure water, sand and chemicals into a well to crack the rock formation and release the gas inside.

Stories like these bubble up across the West's gas patches. And yet, after decades of drilling, public health officials and activists agree that no one knows with any certainty how natural gas production affects the health of people who live near it -- and whether such reports are the leading edge of a health crisis, as activists worry, or isolated accidents, as industry contends. That's because there have been no comprehensive studies of human health impacts.

That may be about to change. Brandon and Denomy belong to the Battlement Concerned Citizens, a small but vocal coalition of retirees, who have pushed Garfield County to fund a health assessment before approving Antero's drilling proposal. It will be one of the first times that regulators will be asked to consider a detailed health assessment when permitting gas drilling. (The only other formal health assessment of an oil and gas project in the U.S. was in Alaska, in 2007.) And it comes at a time when communities -- and policy-makers -- from Wyoming to New York are taking a growing interest in the health impacts of natural gas production.

Battlement Mesa does not look like a good place to drill for natural gas. Its sweeping views -- and top-notch golf course -- have long drawn retirees to its quiet cul-de-sacs. But among the comfortable houses and schools sit 14 sites pre-approved for natural gas well-pads. The sites are a remnant of the community's genesis as a company town, built to house workers for Exxon's ill-fated Colony oil shale project in the early 1980s. Mapped out before most of the houses were built, the sites have sat dormant, unknown to most residents, for over two decades. Dormant, that is, until last summer, when Antero Resources announced plans to drill some 200 wells from 10 of those sites, some only 500 feet from homes.

Drilling can release a range of pollutants. Fracking a well can require hundreds of truck trips, and the associated dust and diesel exhaust can cause respiratory problems. Emissions can combine to form ground-level ozone, a major cardiac and pulmonary toxin. Companies usually keep their fracking-fluid recipes secret, but they can include everything from diesel to methanol. Both fracking fluids and the natural gas itself can contain volatile organic compounds like benzene, a carcinogen that can also damage the nervous system. Those compounds have turned up in drinking water, raising worries that they are migrating to water wells. Fluids stored in open waste pits can contaminate the soil or surface water, or evaporate into the air.

But while researchers may know some of the chemicals being used, and some of their health impacts, they seldom know exactly what is being released into the environment, how much, or at what concentrations. They don't know exactly what people living nearby are exposed to, or for how long. In many cases, they know the health impacts of chemicals at high levels, but not at lower levels. They may know the impacts of one chemical in isolation, but not in combination with the others used in natural gas production. The only way to find out, says Judy Jordan, Garfield County's oil and gas liaison, is to "go in there and start studying people."

"It doesn't seem like rocket science, it seems like common sense. But common sense has fallen victim to business sense in some areas.""

Federal regulators are concerned that a dam built by Monsanto Co. earlier this year to trap phosphate mine runoff may be stopping more than just pollution. They say the dam has also halted millions of gallons of water in Sheep Creek that would otherwise help fill the Blackfoot River.

The Environmental Protection Agency now wants the maker of Roundup herbicide to begin a costly treatment to remove selenium and heavy metals, then discharge clean water downstream, instead of capturing it in a 50-million-gallon lake behind the dam and using it for dust control on its mining roads.

The situation shows the predicament that companies like St. Louis-based Monsanto and the government face in Idaho's rich-but-polluted phosphate mining country not far from Yellowtone National Park: They must work to contain naturally occurring poisons unearthed during a century of digging, while protecting water supplies in an agricultural state hit hard by drought over the last decade.

The aim is to avoid killing streams just to save them. "We support efforts to reduce selenium discharges to the creek, but we have serious concerns about the methods Monsanto is using, which is drying up the creek," said Mark Ryan, a federal Clean Water Act attorney for the EPA in Boise, on Wednesday. "We want to see it (the water) treated and put back into the creek where it belongs."

In 2007, the EPA warned Monsanto that selenium- and heavy metal-tainted water being flushed from the waste rock dump below the South Rasmussen Ridge Mine into Sheep Creek violated the federal Clean Water Act. Sheep Creek runs into the Blackfoot River, and both are on the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality's list of 15 waterways that exceed selenium contamination standards.

Traces of selenium are needed by most animals including humans, but the element is toxic in large amounts. Mines owned by Monsanto, Boise-based J.R. Simplot Co., and Agrium Inc. of Canada in the so-called phosphate patch near the Idaho-Wyoming border have captured public attention since selenium pollution began killing hundreds of livestock starting in the 1990s, including 18 cattle last August.

Monsanto got a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit in early April to erect a roughly 20-foot dam below the dump. It also has rights to the water it has trapped behind the dam."

A widely used microbicide may not be as environmentally friendly as previously thought.

The bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (Bti) is now the most commonly used microbicide to control mosquitoes worldwide and is considered to be the least toxic alternative to chemical pesticides. But a new study has revealed adverse effects on the reproductive success of birds.

When ingested by water-inhabiting mosquito larvae, toxic proteins produced by Bti cause pores to form in the guts of the larvae, destroying their digestive tract and eventually killing them. The microbicide has been in use for more than 25 years and is the favoured method of mosquito control in West Africa, the United States and Europe. The handful of previous field studies on its toxicity to vertebrate populations have not found significant adverse impacts.

But work by Brigitte Poulin, a bird ecologist at the Tour du Valat research centre in Arles, France, and her colleagues — in the Journal of Applied Ecology provides evidence that mosquito control has effects further up the food chain. The team shows that the breeding success of house martins (Delichon urbicum) in Bti-treated areas in a national park in the Camargue, France, dropped dramatically compared with that of birds living in untreated sites. The fall in reproductive success was due to the loss of mosquitoes — the birds' preferred food source.

"We demonstrated that Bti clearly has an impact on house martins," says Poulin.

Pierre Mineau, a pesticide ecotoxicologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, says that the results could help to explain the drop in numbers of insectivorous birds occurring in North America. "As a group, these birds are not doing well but we are at a loss to explain it," he says.

When I heard there was Bt spraying in my area because of bird flu, I quickly objected to the practice: mosquitoes reproduce in water, and their larvae is at the bottom of the food chain on which depends a lot of animals, including ourselves. Humans are deliberately shooting themselves in the foot!

A key piece of the state's approach to controlling water pollution from Pennsylvania's fast-expanding natural gas drilling activity cleared a major hurdle Thursday.

The Independent Regulatory Review Commission voted 4-1 over the objections of the gas industry to approve the Rendell administration's proposal to prevent pollutants in briny drilling wastewater from further tainting public waterways and household drinking water. State environmental officials say too much of the pollutants can kill fish and leave an unpleasant salty taste in drinking water drawn from rivers.

"Drilling wastewater is incredibly nasty wastewater," state Environmental Protection Secretary John Hanger said after the vote at the panel's public meeting. "If we allow this into our rivers and streams, all the businesses in Pennsylvania will suffer ... all those who drink water in Pennsylvania are going to be angry and they would have every reason to be, and all of those who fish and love the outdoors are going to say, `What did you do to our fish and our outdoors?'"

The vote comes at the beginning of what is expected to be a gas drilling boom in Pennsylvania. Exploration companies, armed with new technology, are spending billions to get into position to exploit the rich Marcellus Shale gas reserve, which lies underneath much of the state. The rule would put pressure on drillers to reuse the wastewater or find alternative methods to treat and dispose of the brine, rather than bringing more truckloads of it to sewage treatment plants that discharge into waterways where millions get drinking water.

The rule is designed to take effect Jan. 1. However, the Republican-controlled Senate, a key counterweight to Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, could delay that if it votes to oppose the rule. The drilling industry, as well as a range of business groups and owners, opposes the rule, calling it costly, confusing, arbitrary and rushed during more than three hours of testimony before the regulatory review commission. Some, including a representative of the state's coal industry, said they were worried about how it would affect different industries that also produce polluted water.

Water utilities, environmental advocates and outdoor recreation groups lined up behind it. With drilling companies poised to sink thousands of wells in Pennsylvania, state environmental officials worried that its waterways would become overwhelmed with pollutants. They began writing the new rule last year.

Conventional sewage treatment plants and drinking water treatment plants are not equipped to remove the sulfates and chlorides in the brine enough to comply with the rule. In addition, the chlorides can compromise the ability of bacteria in sewage treatment plants to break down nitrogen, which can be toxic to fish, environmental officials say.

Currently, a portion of the massive amounts of brine being generated by well drilling is entering the state's waterways through sewage treatment plants, and that flow would be unaffected by the rule. Once the rule takes effect, a treatment plant would have to get state approval to process additional amounts of drilling wastewater beyond what it already is allowed, or ensure that it was pretreated by a specialized method that removes sulfates and chlorides.

Hanger said no other industry will be affected and he has worked to incorporate the concerns of business groups that have had more than a year to scrutinize the administration's plans. The companies, he said, are making more than enough money to pay for alternative treatment methods. "There's plenty of money to do this the right way," Hanger said. "But, of course, if you let an industry do it the wrong way, the low-cost way, they will run with it, they will take it. They're not going to be volunteers.""

Pour visiter le site du Groupe d'intervention pour la restauration de la Boyer (GIRB): http://www.girboyer.qc.ca/~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If we are to save our agricultural rivers in Quebec, it seems that the people themselves will have to do it: we can't wait for the governments or the laws to do it for us. The caring, the planting, the respect will have to come from within.

Using new statistical methods, two U.S. Geological Survey scientists found that phosphorus loads decreased slightly in 14 of 18 lake tributaries between 2000 and 2008. Those rivers include Otter Creek and the LaPlatte River, but not the Winooski or Missisquoi rivers, where small increases were detected. Their conclusions contrast with studies using less sophisticated analytical techniques that found no trend, or increasing pollution, in most rivers. While the decreases detected in the new analysis were tiny — 1 percent to 3 percent a year — they showed a general trend in the right direction, lake watchers said.

Frustration has been growing in Vermont about the lack of measurable pollution reduction despite more than a decade of work and $80 million to $100 million of public investment in changing farm practices and installing stormwater control systems.

Medalie and Hirsch used statistical methods that allowed them to identify underlying trends in phosphorus pollution by removing the substantial rainfall-driven fluctuations in river flow from year to year. Phosphorus is a plant nutrient found in manure, commercial fertilizer and organic matter. It is Lake Champlain’s primary pollution problem because phosphorus feeds water weeds and algae blooms that sometimes become toxic to animals and humans. Some of the Medalie/Hirsch findings were consistent with earlier analysis. The LaPlatte River in Hinesburg and Shelburne, for example, showed the steepest decline in phosphorus, the result of sewage treatment upgrades in Hinesburg in the 1990s.

However, the two scientists also found that phosphorus in the river has continued to decline slightly, the likely result of human action to stem non-point pollution — the runoff of dirt, and the phosphorus it carries, from farm fields, suburban lawns and city streets.

Medalie and scientists in the audience said the new analysis raises many questions that require further research. For example, why did the Missisquoi and Winooski rivers not show the same trends as other Vermont streams? What land-based practices drove the slight declines in rivers like Otter and Lewis creeks? In contrast to the hopeful news that started the day, other studies suggested the complex obstacles, now and in the future, to keeping the lake swimmable and fishable.

Smeltzer outlined new work to understand the source of phosphorus that drives algae blooms in Missisquoi Bay, a part of the lake where blooms have been a major problem. He said his models indicate that a “major amount” of phosphorus in the water is released by sediments on the bay floor in the summer. That is likely to delay water quality improvements, even if land sources of phosphorus are reduced."

Unfortunately, after years of overfertilizing land and accelerating drainage of farmland, the damage has been done, and generations to come will have to deal with algae blooms, a slimy lake bottom underfoot while swimming and closed beaches.

The emerging theory about what triggered the 33,000-gallon Red Butte Creek oil spill goes like this:

Strong winds Friday broke off a tree branch that fell onto a power line going to Rocky Mountain Power's fence-enclosed Research Substation in the foothills east of Salt Lake City. In this case, the power line angled into the ground to enter the substation below the surface.

When the branch hit the above-ground portion of the line, it caused an electrical fault that sent voltage through the ground. That charge hit a metal post supporting the security fence and shot a surge arcing down to Chevron's 1950s-era oil pipeline.

The impact punctured a quarter-size hole in the pipe. The pressure of the flow pushed 50 gallons of oil a minute through that hole.

Chevron raised the possibility of an arc involving power lines and a fence post at a Monday news conference in which company spokesman Mark Sullivan increased the volume of the spill to 33,000 gallons, 57 percent higher than the Salt Lake City Fire Department's original estimate of 21,000 gallons.

While the arc theory might help explain the cause of the rupture, Sullivan acknowledged that Chevron officials remained "quite concerned" that two separate monitoring systems along the line, which funnels crude from northwestern Colorado to the company's Salt Lake City refinery, "did not work in this very unusual circumstance."

Since early Saturday, medium crude has stained the Red Butte Creek corridor in modest and affluent neighborhoods, killed fish and birds, pooled in the pond at Liberty Park and crept into the Jordan River.

"It is difficult to imagine a worse location for this pipeline leak," Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said Monday. "Not only did it happen near a beautiful residential area, but it has seriously damaged a treasured riparian area.""

Just thinking that this could happen here, with Trailbreaker or the Portland-Montreal line! Where talking Saint-Lawrence River and the Richelieu River here folks! Our equipment is not new either, you know!

Le document du Regroupement de Mobilisation présenté à la CPTAQ a 78 pages. Quand j'ai quitté la salle, nous étions à la page 62. Je mentionne ici les grandes lignes, mais il semblerait qu'un enregistrement de la réunion sera disponible de la CPTAQ.The citizens's group concerned about shale drilling in the Richelieu Valley was given an audience at the body that protects agricultural land in the province of Quebec. The CPTAQ (Commission de la Protection du Territoire Agricole du Québec) as they are familiarly called, were about to give their consent to Molopo to go ahead and do exploratory drilling in Saint-Marc-sur-Richelieu, even though the 2 reports the company presented still left a lot of unclear answers to concerns presented to them.

In the audience room, there were as many people on the promoters's side as there was people concerned about fracking in the Utica shale. Besides representatives of the Regroupement citoyen « Mobilisation gaz de schiste » that had requested an audience, there was also representatives of AQLPA, of EauSecours and of Friends of the Richelieu.

Much of the arguments were about sustainable development and the precautionary principle, but the main arguments were the weak points of the 2 reports Molopo submitted to the CPTAQ. A dairy farm and a equestrian farm were not mentioned in those reports. But worse of all, the reports looked at the impact on the wrong stream. The promoters looked at the Décharge des 14, but the drilling site is sitting between the 2 Y branches of the springs that feed the ruisseau Richer, which just so happens to be on the receiving end of a lot of restoration and habitat rehabilitation for many years from an environmental foundation in partnership with the UPA, the union representing farmers. The ruisseau Richer is also a watercourse that has a lot of impact on the nearby Copper Redhorse feeding grounds in the Richelieu River in its alevin stage. The Copper Redhorse is endangered and on the COSEWIK list: http://www.cosewic.gc.ca/

The audience started late and was not over when I had to leave, so I did not get to hear the response of the promoters to the citizen's argumentation, but I hope that we were able to drive our point: can we do this right?

After years of playing down risks, the state environmental agency, prompted by news media and a state senator, has recently acknowledged air quality problems. And the death of a utility worker this month in Cleburne, 30 miles south of Fort Worth (a line carrying Barnett Shale gas exploded after workers accidentally hit it), heightened anxieties. The issue has divided the city as it grapples with allowing drillers to put money in residents' pockets on the one hand and protecting public health and safety on the other.

But questions about air quality were raised in Fort Worth after officials in the nearby town of DISH, also above the Barnett Shale, blamed natural gas drilling for health issues. After DISH's Town Council paid for its own air quality tests, which found high levels of 15 chemicals, officials from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said they would take a closer look.

Now the agency has had to play catch-up in Fort Worth. Since the beginning of the year, it has hired additional inspectors and doubled the number of permanent air quality monitoring stations in the area.

It has also engaged in crisis management after the transparency of its test results was called into question.

At a January meeting, an agency official declared, "The air is safe," the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported. But an internal audit at the agency found that samples were not tested with proper equipment. A retest found that three samples were above certain limits for benzene; one sample, at a country club in town, was at levels high enough to cause nausea and headaches in some people."

Pesticides are having a toxic effect on amphibians even at concentrations substantially lower than federal allowable levels, a study in the southern Okanagan Valley has found. Alexandra de Jong Westman, a biologist with Vernon-based Summit Environmental Consultants Ltd., said the results emphasize the inadequacies of current regulations, including accepted standards for lab testing that fall short of field conditions. "All the pesticide regulations in Canada are based on lab results," she said in an interview. "There is a fundamental flaw in that."

Her findings are based on two years of lab studies and four years of field work involving the Pacific tree or chorus frog and great basin spadefoot in the southern Okanagan between Penticton and Osoyoos, on the Canada-U.S. border. It is one of Canada's most endangered landscapes for wildlife due to habitat loss from human development, including agriculture and vineyards. With funding from the Canadian Wildlife Service, de Jong Westman studied pesticide levels in agriculture irrigation ponds susceptible to pesticide run-off, the amount varying based on the season, the pest and the crop.

When she duplicated the highest levels under ideal lab conditions -- only one pesticide in purified water, stable temperature, no predators and no ultraviolet light -- she found toxic effects on amphibians well below federal limits. She said pesticide regulations are based on short-term lab results, not those in the field where toxicity can be much higher due to long-term exposure and the potential for more than one pesticide or contaminant to increase toxicity.

De Jong Westman said that based on LC50 tests she performed in 2007 on American bullfrogs -- an introduced species that tends to be found in ponds less polluted than those of native species -- the allowable limit for amphibians for the pesticide endosulfan is about 7.74 milligrams per litre. An LC50 test determines the amount of pesticide required to kill 50 per cent of test animals over four days. During the eight-day period of growth from egg to tadpole in her latest work, she found that endosulfan -- a controversial organochlorine and endocrine disrupter that's banned in Europe and some U.S. states, but not in Canada -- caused morphological and physiological changes. At 60,000 nanograms per litre, or just 0.06 milligrams, it caused kinking in the tail and loss of pigmentation in tadpoles. The latter would make them more vulnerable to predation in a brown pond environment. Even trace amounts of endosulfan caused excitability in tadpoles, the condition worsening with the amount of pesticide added to the water.

"We cannot expect to manage a species or habitat from lab results when there is more going on in the field, making the allowable standard highly toxic," she said. Exposure to ultraviolet light in the field can also worsen the toxic effects of pesticides like endosulfan, she said. Frogs and other amphibians face a host of threats beyond pesticides that include habitat loss and fragmentation, invasive species, increased ultraviolet radiation and predation. "

More and more studies are coming out and revealing the toxicity of our pesticides and their effects on the fauna around us. Amphibians are more vulnerable because they breathe through their skin and live where all our drainage water ends up, along with our toxins and our pollution. They are the canaries in the coal mine of the aquatic world.

“Cancer can be beaten.” For decades that’s been the battle cry for the war against cancer. But a growing body of scientific evidence says that the biggest weapon that we have in the fight against the disease is prevention. And the very best way to fuel that weapon is to eliminate pollutants in our environment that have been directly linked to a host of cancers.

“We know that the cancer epidemic is being fueled by carcinogens in our air, water and food,” said Liz Armstrong, co-author of Cancer: 101 Solutions to a Preventable Epidemic.

Many of these carcinogens are found in common items that we use every day in our homes, schools and businesses. For example, certain pesticides have been linked to lymphomas, leukemia, prostate, lung, breast and ovarian cancer. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, are found in everything from car and truck exhaust to second-hand smoke, and have been linked to lung, skin, bladder, kidney and other cancers. Formaldehyde, commonly used in pressed wood furniture and a variety of other products, has a causal link to lymphatic cancers and brain tumors. Identifying and eliminating these known carcinogens from our environment can help prevent cancers even before they start.

According to General Cancer Statistics 2010, The Canadian Cancer Society’s Annual report released last month, “At least 50 per cent of cancers can be prevented through healthy living and policies that promote healthy environments.” This is echoed by the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s President’s Cancer Panel Annual Report, also released in May, that states, ”Research suggests that at least half of all new cancer cases and cancer deaths worldwide are preventable.”

“From the right to know and the duty to inquire follows the obligation to act,” said Sandra Steingraber, scientist, author of Living Downstream, and cancer survivor. She believes that cancer prevention is possible by abolishing known carcinogens. Carcinogens cause mutations in DNA, which ultimately can lead to cancer. An estimated two-thirds of all cancers that are caused by environmental carcinogens could be eliminated. “If the science showed us that the disease is mostly driven by genes, then I would feel depressed,” said Steingraber. “In reality, only five per cent of all cancers are triggered by genetic factors.” “We can’t change our ancestry, but we can change our systems of agriculture and industry so that they are not dependent on toxic chemicals,” she said. “We can prevent cancer by protecting people from what causes cancer.”

The key is to reduce exposure to known environmental carcinogens and reducing the use of chemicals, risks and other known contaminants. Here’s a checklist:

Filter tap water to reduce exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals and known carcinogens.

Store or carry water in stainless steel containers (this reduces exposure to chemicals while reducing plastics production, a known source of toxic by-products)

Dr. Sandra Steingraber’s book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer (1997) was recently translated to the big screen by Canadian director Chandra Chevannes. The book’s second edition, entitled Living Downstream - An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (Da Capo Press, 2010), was released in April to coincide with the release of the Living Downstream documentary. For more information about the Living Downstream documentary, books or the ongoing work of Sandra Steingraber, visit http://www.livingdownstream.com/."

Unfortunately, when it comes to water, each one of us is much less in control of our exposure to toxic chemicals. The article mentions the filtration of tap water, but that is only good if the consumer changes the filter regularly: otherwise, the practice is self-defeating. An old filter only adds to the concentration of toxic substances plus increases the chance of exposure to bacteria cultures or other pathogens. And the author obviously doesn't enjoy swimming like I do: besides taking a shower after a swim in the ocean, in a river or a lake, what else can one do besides abstain?

I'm the second generation of my family that lives in Richelieu, Quebec, in Canada. My family tree, both from my mother's and my father's side, has its roots in Quebec since the beginning of the 1600s: my ancestors crossed the ocean from France, leaving Perche and Normandy behind them. Both French AND English are my mother tongues: I learned to talk in both languages when I was a baby, and both my parents were perfectly bilingual too.